Welcoming New Authors: March / April 2014

In the last “Introducing authors” article, we mentioned a whopping 11 new authors. Admittedly, the period the last article encompassed was far longer than two months, but the publishing schedule has changed since as well, and I’d like to mention that in this post.

First things first, though – let’s shake hands with the new recruits!

New Authors

These six authors have joined our ranks through March and April. Some are pros, others are just getting there, but all are welcome and their contributions appreciated – with such a diversity in country of origin, our channel is quickly becoming a true melting pot of attitudes, approaches and thoughts.

Surendra Mohan is a prolific developer from India. He published “Administrating Solr” with Packt Publishing, spoke at conferences and held training sessions about Drupal, among other things. He only had a single article published with us so far, in which he discusses the various Symfony and third party components that Drupal 8 will be adopting. He is currently writing an ElasticSearch series, so stay tuned if you’d like to take your search implementation to the next level!

Agbonghama is a Nigerian author and a junior PHP developer. He mostly writes about his findings in short snippets on his own blog. Willing to learn and improve, Agbonghama isn’t shy about admitting what he isn’t familiar with and gradually gets better with every piece he submits. In web development (as in life in general), fear of asking is the worst showstopper.

Denis, a Zend certified PHP Developer from Romania, also only had one article published so far. The piece ran into a bit of controversy when it turned out that the technology he wrote about turned commercial and removed all traces of its open source version on the very same day the article got published. FusionInvoice was covered well by Denis who explained both the use cases and the installation procedure, letting you handle your own invoicing needs if you’re a freelancer or a small business.

Mufleeh, a junior web developer from Sri Lanka, wrote about the theory of HTTPS and why you should use it. Even though the Heartbleed disaster rocked people’s trust in SSL, the article is still an important piece if you’re doing any kind of sensitive form submitting in your apps. Mufleeh is currently swamped with writing an advanced piece on HTTPS and a very neat article about documenting your app in an unconventional way, so stay tuned!

Wern, a web developer from the Philippines, wrote about versioning the database with DBV. As a precursor to Lukas White’s Versioning with Ladder, his article establishes common ground on which to compare database versioning methods. Wern is currently writing about task automation for us.

Younes, a self-proclaimed Laravel addict, came into the saloon guns blazing. His debut was a tutorial on implementing paid website memberships with Laravel’s Cashier and Stripe – an incredibly interesting and otherwise complex topic, unless you’re using tools like Cashier and Laravel, designed to make everyone’s life easier. Younes is currently preparing to dive even deeper into the mystical lands of advanced Laravel, so keep watching this space if you’d like to see some DI and IoC secrets uncovered.

Call for Action

The new authors are all of varying degree of expertise. We don’t discriminate or look for CS degrees when letting people write – what we care about is passion. Passion to learn, passion to teach, passion to investigate, discover and deduct. We’re building a community, and a community isn’t a flock of clones.

If you’d like to know more, please contact me at bruno.skvorc@sitepoint.com, @bitfalls or +BrunoSkvorc. We now have a new schedule of 5 or more articles per week, so you can expect to see much more content from us. But to produce this content, we need writers like you.

Did you develop a library that you’d like to demonstrate? Do you have a Packagist package you think the public isn’t but should be aware of? Maybe you’d like to show people how you transitioned from legacy to modern PHP code. Wrote a great Vagrant file that bootstraps your every project? Have a specialty like emails, devops, testing, interactive debugging? Let us know – all you need is some decent English on your tongue and a desire to contribute.

Even if you’re just starting out, we’d like to have a chat and learn what you’re missing, what you need, and what you feel is stopping you from moving into the professional waters. Regardless of how you’d like to contribute, get in touch and we’ll brainstorm about approaches together.

Bruno is a coder from Croatia with Master’s Degrees in Computer Science and English Language and Literature. He runs a cryptocurrency business at Bitfalls.com via which he trades crypto and makes blockchain tech approachable to the masses. He’s also an editor for SitePoint, and a developer evangelist for Diffbot.com.